Show Your Donors Some Love this Valentine’s Day
A Valentine’s Day donor stewardship campaign is a fun and festive way to develop strong relationships with your donors (which in turn will turn into more frequent and larger gifts). It’s time to tap into our elementary school days and get ready to send some Valentine’s Day love!
An email newsletter is a fun, easy, and low-cost way to tell donors how much you love them. We love this email from Charity:Water. It’s simple, sincere, and bursting with Valentines’ Day vibes. Remember:
Keeping your email short and sweet. You don’t need more than one or two paragraphs of copy.
Sharing a short story about your work that highlights why your donors matter.
Making it donor-centered by focusing on how your donors make your work possible.
Using fun, festive imagery to bring your email to life.
Send your donors an old-fashioned Valentine’s Day card! Our inboxes are cluttered, and data shows that physical mail will resonate more strongly than email so that Valentine’s Day card is one way to make sure you put a smile on your donors’ faces. You can:
Send a Valentine’s Day postcard to your whole mailing list, or a segment (such as donors who gave more than $250 last year). You can design a fun postcard in Canva and even order the postcards directly through their site, or hire a professional designer to create custom artwork for your donors.
Use a site like Touchnote to design and send cute custom cards to your top donors.
Keep it simple and head to your local drugstore for a pack of thank-you cards, and write handwritten notes to your top donors!
Read More: Want to keep your donors? Send Them a Thank You Letter
Personal Outreach
Nothing will delight donors as much as a personal thank you and Valentine’s Day is a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate your gratitude.
Host a phone thank-a-thon and call all your donors just to say “thank you”. Imagine how many donors you could reach if all of your board members called five people!
Host a cultivation event like a cocktail hour or brunch. I encourage my clients to host quarterly cultivation events, so Valentine’s Day is the ideal time!
No matter what you choose to do, a Valentines’ Day thank-you campaign will have an incredible impact on your donors.
Read more: Build your donor base by mapping your relationships
Want more ideas on how to build strong relationships with your donors?
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